Grammys 2019 Review: A More Equitable Show Still Hits Familiar Pitfalls

By Danile D'AddarioReuters

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) - Last year, the Grammys came
under fire for a relative dearth of female winners and
performers onstage and, furthermore, for Recording Academy chief
Neil Portnow saying that women needed to "step up" in order to
be recognized.

"I guess this year we really stepped up," best new artist
winner Dua Lipa quipped in her acceptance speech. But women in
music doing superlative work is no new phenomenon. Before
delivering criticisms of a show that is in many ways continuing
a long-term slide, it's worth noting that the ceremony itself
stepped up this year.

In an invigorating one-two punch early in the night, Kacey
Musgraves and Janelle Monae delivered performances that served
to justify their places among the night's top nominees;
Musgraves' take on her own song "Rainbow," illuminated with a
prism of colored light, came across as a bit of low-key advocacy
for the LGBT community, while Monae's medley of songs off her
"Dirty Computer" album was a worthy provocation. Quoting her own
record, Monae shouted "Let the vagina have a monolog!," a note
fitting material whose frankness and imagination helped vault
Monae to greater prominence than ever before.

Musgraves' show-closing album of the year win made for a
thrilling rebound from the previous year's "step up" nightmare,
and marked the mainstream coronation of an artist who uses her
moments in the national spotlight with care and thought.

The whole night was full of emerging stars every bit as
exciting. Cardi B (using an apparent lip-sync to her advantage,
focusing more fully on her showmanship) and rising star H.E.R.
owned their moments on the stage, lending the refreshing feeling
of stars being cemented or first established, rather than just
burnished; Cardi's speech for best rap album (the first win in
that category for a solo female artist) was refreshingly frank,
in keeping with the traits that have made her a star for the
unvarnished social-media age.

Lady Gaga's Bradley Cooper-less spin on "Shallow" was one of
the evening's few duds -- it was as though, separated from her
duet partner, she were running through all her first-draft ideas
before a more "serious" Oscars moment. The performance's
"Artpop"-leftover glam-rock trappings and miscalculated
theatrics felt like a retreat into the safety of falsity,
unworthy of a star who'd shown us so much subtle calibration and
real inspiration in her movie this year. But her inclusion, and
willingness to take a risk in a pre-Oscar season when safety
might be more advisable, was appreciated, too.

Elsewhere in the show, even the boring or obligatory pieces
of Grammy-iana were given a happily female spin. A group of
women artists including Maren Morris, Musgraves, Katy Perry, and
Miley Cyrus (along with the co-ed Little Big Town) joined Dolly
Parton for the rote sort of tribute to a legend that was, for
once, directed at a female icon.

Diana Ross' paying tribute to herself at 75 had a similar
reinventing-the-musical-canon sense, while presenting a bit more
crisply and with a welcome helping of Ross' loopily fun
self-regard. "Happy birthday to me!" she shouted as she ended
her time onstage; her birthday is in late March. (The less said
about the deeply strange and classically Grammys choice of
Jennifer Lopez to perform a Motown tribute, the better.)

Host Alicia Keys, who bore the brunt of several production
errors and was often somnolent when speaking (as in a well-meant
but misbegotten opening set piece including speeches by Gaga and
Michelle Obama), came alive at a piano running through a medley
of other artists' hits, and one of her own. Was it necessary?
Little on the Grammys ever is. But it felt a bit different than
the sort of thing -- endless rock by white men, even as that
genre and that demographic class of artist has lost its hold on
the music listening public's imagination -- that generally
predominates.

The show handled the optics problem around gender elegantly
and well, by giving real time and attention to women artists who
deserved the space, and who might never have been given the
shine if not for the "step up" scandal. But recent years have
not been easy on the Grammys on several fronts. The show's last
truly star-packed show, in 2017, featured a showdown between
Adele and Beyonce. Adele winning -- a predictable outcome given
the Academy's tastes for white artists and for genres rooted in
the oldest sorts of popular-music tradition, but one that
incensed admirers of Beyonce, who'd just lost the top prize for
her second industry-shifting album in a row -- seemed to break a
dam of sorts. The Grammys had a legitimacy problem, one that
allowed artists who'd been frustrated to disengage.

A particularly embarrassing moment came in the presentation
of the song of the year Grammy, when Keys delivered a
stem-winding story about having desperately wanted to win that
prize earlier in her career, so much so that the artist who beat
her, John Mayer, gave her a piece of his trophy. Two people for
whom this top-category award had served a meaningful symbolic
purpose then presented the award to Childish Gambino's
incendiary hip-hop song "This Is America" -- with Gambino, nee
Donald Glover, not in attendance. (The absent star also won
record of the year.)

This was a historic milestone, the first Grammy in this
category awarded to a rap artist. And it was one that had taken
so long in coming that Gambino skipping the ceremony (appearing
during the ceremony only in an ad for Google Pixel phones, in
which he danced with an animated avatar) seemed a more
legitimate choice than showing up. Somewhere in the shift
between Keys' generational cohort and Gambino's, the show had
fallen out of favor.

A clue as to why came in the next performance, which was a
team-up between white rapper Post Malone and the Red Hot Chili
Peppers. Malone, a white practitioner of a historically black
art form, was that genre's first performer of the night, nearly
an hour into the show, calling to mind another recent
controversy, the Grammys' honoring white rapper Macklemore over
his better-regarded black peers. And the Peppers were performing
material that seemed, at least to this viewer, not urgently
recognizable enough to demand a performance in the first hour of
an awards show honoring new music.

The Grammys' eligibility period has always caused them
grief -- as with the show's opening number "Havana," released by
Camila Cabello in September 2017. That's forever in music-fan
years. But something bigger is at work here. The Grammys are so
self-consciously meant for any possible viewer that they shy
away from edge. For a generation of artists whose strength is
their spiky distinctiveness, it no longer feels like a show to
which it behooves even top winners to pay deference, or even
attention.

Gambino was hardly alone. Joining just about every one of
her peers at the very top of the industry in bypassing the show
was Ariana Grande -- who, unlike Gambino, Taylor Swift, Beyonce,
Jay-Z, Ed Sheeran, Rihanna, Kanye West, Justin Bieber, Chance
the Rapper, Adele, the Weeknd, and so on -- at least provided a
reason in public. (Drake showing up to claim a trophy came as a
shock -- before it seemed in service of a rhetorical point, as
he gave a speech urging artists to pay less attention to awards
before appearing to get cut off by a throw to commercial.)

That none of those other stars, some of whom have things to
promote and others of whom could in some universe provide to the
Grammys the boost mega-movie-star presenters give the Oscars
each year, even bothered to give a reason for skipping a show
that touts itself as "Music's Biggest Night" is bad news.

Grande's public repudiation of show producer Ken Ehrlich,
who she claimed was being dishonest about her failure to perform
on the broadcast (she said her "creativity self expression
was stifled by" Ehrlich to the extent that she was not just
canceling a planned performance but staying home entirely) was
worse. That Grande ended up winning her first career Grammy
before the telecast began cemented the error -- this was the
sort of career-capping moment that could have made great
television, were Ehrlich willing to cut into the time he
afforded the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or to a lengthy tribute to
the work of Portnow himself, moments after Dua Lipa's onstage
dig.

This is a show that would rather spotlight a Jennifer Lopez
Motown tribute -- privileging music's legacy institutions and
employing a blue-chip star with little connection to the
material -- than the industry's epicenter; no wonder so many
close to that center keep themselves busy doing other things on
Music's Biggest Night.

Per the reporting of Variety's Jem Aswad and Shirley
Halperin, the crux of Grande's disagreement with the Grammys
camp was their refusal to allow her to perform her new single "7
Rings" -- which, incidentally, is currently the number-one song
on the Billboard charts, off an album only just released Friday
by an artist whose present level of fast-burning level of
success and acclaim currently lacks an equal.

Grande is currently the biggest act in music, with a
narrative -- having overcome tragedies on the global and
personal scale -- that is endlessly telegenic. Anything she did
would compel; the Grammys would have been well-advised to give
her 15 minutes. (She, too, appeared during ad breaks, in an
Apple ad in which she, like Glover, was depicted as an animated
avatar and a T-Mobile spot where her song "Thank U, Next"
played. Her absence was made literal -- the corporeal Grande
didn't even show up to her own commercials.)

But Ehrlich, the longtime Grammys producer whose broadcast
tends to fall into certain well-known, unlovable grooves
(endless tributes to acts from the past and a privileging of
rock music over rap and R&B even as the latter genres have
overtaken the music industry), was resolute. And in falling
short of getting, or not trying all that hard to get, music's
top acts, plural, on board a broadcast centered around that most
youth-oriented, vanguard-courting of media, he failed his
broadcast.

It strikes an awards-watcher that the Grammys, honoring
practitioners in a field vulnerable to youthquakes but for so
long produced by the most risk-averse of industry types, and the
Oscars, whose great strength is their robust tradition but whose
producers, swapped in and out practically every year, are always
seeking to reinvent, should swap strategies. I'd like to see
what the producer and director who handled Beyonce's Super Bowl
appearances, the MTV creative team (CBS' corporate siblings!),
or "The Voice" consigliere Mark Burnett would do with the
Grammys. But really, crucially, I'd just like to see something
different -- and sustained star power, for one thing, would be a
note the Grammys haven't meaningfully hit in a couple of years.